This is when the side door of the house, the one that opens on the driveway, eases open and Nicole appears.
None of the neighbors have ever seen Nicole look like this. Hair unkempt, pajamas torn and blood-soaked, hands filthy with blood. Blood everywhere. Even in her hair. Even on her feet. Blood. No mistaking what it is. Blood. She stands in the headlights of the police car, moths and gnats and mosquitoes thick around the headlights (big motor throbbing unevenly, needing points and plugs), and that is where the neighbors get their first good look at the knife she used. Butcher knife. Long wooden handle. Good but not great steel. A knife she just grabbed from the silverware drawer before going upstairs.
A second prowl car. This one dispersing two cops. Man and woman. The man starts dealing with the crowd. Pushing them back. The woman goes directly to Nicole.
“I need to know your name, miss, and what happened here.”
But Nicole is long gone.
The first cop comes down the steps. Says something to the female officer and then goes in the side door.
“What’s your name, miss?” the female cop asks in a soft voice. “I want to help you. I really do.”
The crowd has grown greatly in a few minutes. Two different TV stations are here now, one in a large van, the other in a muddy Plymouth station wagon.
The first cop is back from inside. Goes to the other male cop. “It’s a mess in there. A man and woman. The woman looks like the girl there. She stabbed the hell out of them. It’s a frigging mess.”
A few people in the crowd are close enough to hear this. A whisper like an undulating snake works its way through the crowd. Shock and sadness and yet a glee and excitement, too. The shock for the pitiful young girl standing blood-soaked in the headlights, her mind obviously gone; and yet glee and excitement, too. Every day life is so — everyday. No denying the excitement here. And didn’t Kate Sanders think she was at least a little bit better than everybody else? And exactly who was that man who’d moved in a while ago? And now look at Nicole. Poor, poor Nicole.
The reporter from the van, having heard what the cop found inside, now gets his cameraman to follow him around as he gets statements from various neighbors.
“Well, Kate, the mother, she and her husband split up a few years ago.”
“They were very quiet people, really, though I think everybody knew that Kate had quite a few personal problems.”
The cameraman angles his machine up the driveway, letting his lens linger on the lovely, crazed, blood-spattered girl standing in the headlights, Ophelia of the suburbs, which will make great fucking TV, just this lone shot of this lone heart-breaking crazy fucking girl.
And (voice over) a neighbor lady saying into the microphone: “It’s just so hard to believe. She was such a good girl; such a good girl.”
Aftermath
1
Not even the other cops much liked Frazier. He was too angry, too bitter to spend much time with. And he enjoyed the dirty aspects of the job too much. Hurting people. Shaking down shopkeepers and pushers and the richer variety of junkies. Getting freebies from the hookers and then beating them up afterwards and daring their pimps to do anything about it. In Vietnam, it had been called fragging, a grunt shooting his superior officer in the back and blaming it on the Cong. There’d been more than one boozy cop-bar conversation about good old Frazier getting fragged some night.
Josh Coburn managed to get the split pea soup off Lisa’s face but not her white shirt. Oh well, what ten-month-old didn’t walk around with part of her latest meal on her blouse?
“All right, honey,” he said, down on one knee, steadying the home video camera so he could capture her walking toward him. “C’mon to Daddy.”
Josh was babysitting his daughter tonight while Elise went shopping for their Christmas gifts. She’d laughed and said that Josh was more of a baby than Lisa about wanting to know what she was going to get them.
The living room of the Tudor-styled home sparkled with decorations. This year’s tree was so tall they’d had to cut off the top to fit the angel on. Blue, red, yellow and green lights played off the glass doors of the fireplace, and imbued everything in the room with an air of festivity.
“Daddy! Daddy!” Lisa giggled as she toddled toward Josh.
The camera was last year’s Christmas gift. Elise had said that it was guaranteed idiot-proof, meaning that even a mechanical dunce like Josh could operate it.
And then he was on his feet, shooting straight down on her as she danced around in something resembling a circle, waving her tiny hand at Harold the Cat as he strode into the living room. “Hi Harral!” she shouted.
And then she was running toward Josh, arms spread wide. He swung her around and around. Daddy’s girl. And neither of them would have it any other way.
He’d done this before.
It was an odd thought to have at this moment when her fists were smashing his face and her knee was trying to find his groin.
But she couldn’t help but notice that for all the violence of his sudden assault, he was careful not to tear her clothes or bruise her. He was thinking of afterward. He did not want to mark up his victims.
And almost ludicrously — he was already wearing a condom. He’d probably put it on before he’d come to work. Ready. Knowing he was bound to run into somebody he could lure away as he’d lured her.
And then he was inside her. And she was sobbing. But she was no longer hitting him or trying to knee him. She was spent now. She just wanted it over with. She knew he wouldn’t kill her. If that had been his intention, he wouldn’t have been so careful not to mark her up.
He finished quickly and that gave her a strange surge of pleasure. He probably thought of himself as a swaggering macho man. And he couldn’t even last two minutes.
Lisa wasn’t old enough to say prayers. So there in her in pink crib, he said them for her. He prayed for Mommy and Daddy and Grandma and Grandpa and Harold the Cat and Princess her doll. Then he thanked God on her behalf for all the good things they had in their lives, and said a prayer for those who weren’t so fortunate and asked that they be similarly blessed.
He gave her a kiss, checked her diapers a final time, and then turned out the light and left the room.
Downstairs, he fixed himself a light scotch and water and sat in the TV room watching the last of an NBA game. He kept the sound down so he could hear Lisa if she called out. He routinely checked her every fifteen minutes. He would have checked her every five but Elise had finally broken him of that neurotic habit.
Not until ten o’clock did he begin to worry. The malls were open an extra hour this last week leading up to Christmas. Maybe she’d stayed till ten. But if she had, why not call him? There were plenty of public phones around and she had a cell phone besides.
He thought of looking over the storyboards one more time. Early tomorrow morning they’d be pitching the Chuck Wagon fast food account. As the TV producer on the potential account, he’d be responsible for approximately a fourth of the whole dog-and-pony show. But, no. He’d looked them over three times earlier tonight. They were fine. He was proud of them. They were classic hard-sell ads and that’s just what the account — which had lost 16 % market share in the past two years — badly needed. Their present agency relied too much on whimsy. Chuck Wagon needed a whole new approach.
At eleven o’clock, he was in Lisa’s room, changing her. She’d developed a diaper rash and so he was powdering her when he heard Elise come in. He called downstairs to her but there was no answer. He wondered why not.